Thinking About Musicking

In 1975, Christopher Small, a 48-year-old senior lecturer at a
London college of higher education, approached independent
publisher John Calder with a half-completed translation of
Fragments Théoretiques sur la Musique Expérimental, by the Belgian
serialist Henri Pousseur. Small had left his native New Zealand in
1961 after receiving a grant to study composition in the mother
country. There he fell in with avant-gardists he now believes
derailed whatever compositional impulse he had, although he did
produce several educational works as well as one called Actions for
Chorus: Some Maori Place Names. Since Calder had put out titles by
Cage and Ives, he seemed a good match for the recondite Belgian,
but the publisher was more interested in the translator. Soon he
was asking when Small would be writing his own book.

"Well, you know, every academic thinks he's got a book in
him," Small told me recently in Sitges, Spain, a seaside outpost of
Barcelona where he's lived with companion Neville Braithwaite since
1986. Designated a "guru" by more than one admirer, Small is a
tubby, affable man with a trim white beard who speaks in a
ruminative murmur few would call charismatic; several times he
apologized for not answering my questions snappily enough. But he
certainly did have a book in him. In the end, in fact, he had
three. But only Music, Society, Education came easy--he wrote his
visionary critique of classical music's industrial-capitalist
apparatus in less than a year. And that, Small figured, would be
that. "I expected it just to sink from sight. It never occurred to
me that there was anything out of the ordinary about it."

Soon, however, Music, Society, Education received a glowing
notice from the pop-friendly English musicologist Wilfrid Mellers.
"A whole torrent of reviews" followed, although Small seems just as
gratified by all the "letters from undergrads and schoolkids--several
letters from schoolkids--and students in music college."
What caused the clamor was that Small had examined classical music
from the inside and found it wanting--humanly wanting as opposed to
aesthetically wanting, to exploit a distinction he has little use
for. Small's literary presentation mirrored his musical values,
which emphasize music's function in, well, society and education.
Deeply thoughtful and broadly informed without any of the usual
shows of erudition (spare footnotes, no bibliography), it really
was accessible to interested schoolkids, and although Small insists
that it was not conceived as an "attack," it alarmed the old guard
mightily. It was both more sweeping and more unassuming than
anything Mellers had in him, and its commitment to democracy had a
radical edge absent from the centrist middlebrow Henry Pleasants,
whose crankier Serious Music and All That Jazz, Death of a
Music?, and The Agony of Modern Music Small would only
discover later.

What distinguished Small from his fellow dissenters was that
he wasn't just an antielitist praising melody and rhythm, much less
an elitist spinning off into some airless avant-garde stratosphere.
He was driven by an overriding idea: that music is always a social
activity, never a reified thing. Thus the Balinese and African
musics his first book describes early on are the equals of the
European classical tradition whose audience he is addressing, and
perhaps its superior. The moral agenda that goes with this concept
not only insists on music's social context but challenges "the
whole idea of music as communication"--especially the myth of the
composer as an anointed genius with a message to impart to his
inferiors in the orchestra and the audience.

It took Small 10 laborious years to reconfigure these concerns
in what he calls "my favorite of my three children"--an
idiosyncratic, autodidactic history of African American music.
Music of the Common Tongue is an ambitious, original, moving
synthesis, propelled once again by Small's signature ideas. But
because he came to the subject late and learned American history on
his own, it's awkwardly researched, and while there's earnest charm
and emotional power in the book's flaws, they're sometimes
distracting or misleading, especially when they touch on such
white-dominated precincts as Tin Pan Alley and country music. It's
easy to imagine a more smoothly executed version turning Small into
a genuine intellectual celebrity. Instead, it remained surprisingly
obscure--the time wasn't right for such a radical book, and Calder
did nothing to compensate. By pub date Small and Braithwaite, a
Jamaican-born youth worker in music and dance, had escaped
Thatcher's England and retired to Sitges, an old Catalan community
that has accommodated significant touristic, bohemian, and gay
infusions.

One hallmark of Small's modestly momentous career, grounded in
classical music and then bent toward America as it is, is that he
never got the time of day from the U.S. classical establishment,
which he observes is far more snobbish and insular than the
European. In Britain, Mellers and Pleasants were like-minded
predecessors, but insofar as he was noticed at all in America it
was usually by the likes of radical ethnomusicologist Charles Keil
and rock critic Dave Marsh, who first told me about Music of the
Common Tongue. Music, Society, Education I'd discovered on my own
at St. Mark's, which is pretty much how Susan McClary came across
it shortly after it was published here in the early '80s. McClary
was then formulating the deconstruction of music theory that would
eventually blossom into the so-called new musicology as well as
McClary's MacArthur grant, and she immediately started teaching
Small's book, which both reinforced and influenced her own
thinking: "It's had a profound effect on the people who have read
it--in musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies." McClary and
her husband, Robert Walser, have become friends of Small--they were
vacationing in Sitges when I visited. Together with George Lipsitz,
they edit Wesleyan University Press's Music/Culture series, which
rescued Small's first two books from Calder and then spurred him to
turn a daunting pile of manuscript fragments into 1998's Musicking.

Musicking is calmer than Small's manifesto or his love child.
Far-ranging by conventional musicological standards, it's
nevertheless the most focused of his books, and also a return to
his roots: a step-by-step examination of a symphonic performance,
starting in the foyer of the concert hall and building to a meta-analysis
of symphonic form and impact, with various "preludes,"
"postludes," "interludes," and outright afterthoughts and asides
along the way. Perhaps due to Wesleyan's visibility, it's gotten
the bulk of its attention in the U.S. "In Britain it's, `Oh, Chris
Small, good knockabout stuff but not to be taken seriously,'" Small
says. It's slow at times--there's much about Gregory Bateson's
antidualistic theory of mind, which provides a theoretical
framework the way Ivan Illich's anarchist notions did in Music,
Society, Education--but I think it's his most powerful book.

First there's the term "musicking" itself, introduced in Music
of the Common Tongue to underline Small's thesis that music is
always an activity rather than a thing, but now, promoted as a
title, showing up all over McClary's wing of academia and
eventually, you bet, journalistic discourse as well. And then
there's Small's climactic point, which is that music's ultimate
function isn't to order time, that industrial fallacy, but to
provide insight into relationships: between and among notes and
chords and rhythms and meters and many other classes of sound, and
also musicians and listeners, composers and conductors (not to
mention producers and a&r folk, DJs and critics). As Small
demonstrates vividly by outlining a few sample "secondary" and
"tertiary" relationships in numbingly tortuous words, it's a very
efficient way to embody and sum up relatedness, which is the
essence of social if not human life. Thus, music becomes as
integral to mental health as music chauvinists are forever claiming
it is.

Small takes care to define "musicking" as broadly and kindly
as possible. The concept definitely encompasses dancing and
listening--a girl with a Walkman is one of his prime examples. But
like so many pop sympathizers with folk affinities--I think of
Robert Palmer in Rock & Roll: An Unruly History, of Robert Cantwell
in Bluegrass Breakdown, and especially of Charles Keil, who's made
a mission of teaching elementary schoolers and frat-rat klutzes to
play the drums--he's enamored of live performance and suspicious of
recordings. As is my practice, I brought a few CDs I thought would
be down his alley to our meeting--alt-rappers Blackalicious, the
glorious Senegalese Music in My Head. Small declined to put them
on. In fact, he told me, he doesn't do much listening these days,
certainly not to anything unfamiliar, although once in a while
someone comes along and gives him a kick. Instead he spends
extensive musicking time playing the piano as well as he can
(better than he admits, I bet)--Mozart's sonatas have been a
special revelation recently. And although he's working on a lecture
he's been asked to deliver in New Zealand, he told me he has no
plans for another book. After all, if past performance is any
indicator, it wouldn't come out till he's 80.

Having just learned that developments in sociobiology had
unsettled his politics slightly--having learned, that is, that his
mind was as active as ever--I could only hope he was wrong about
the book. Small is a writer so humane he makes those who fulminate
reflexively against the "academic" look like bigots as well as
morons. He was a late bloomer, and he's getting on. But he's proven
someone for whom teaching comes as naturally as musicking. I very
much doubt he has nothing more to tell us.